thegrim000 (u/thegrim000)

thegrim000 commented on Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center space.com/space-explorati... · Posted by u/troglo-byte

oasisaimlessly · 4 days ago

All energy inevitably changes into heat eventually, and in the steady state, power in = power out.

There is no way to get rid of heat. It has to go somewhere; otherwise, the temperature of the system will increase without bound.

thegrim000 · 3 days ago

For example, why couldn't you use the waste heat like a power plant? Use it to boil water, to turn turbines, to generate electricity, which gets sent and consumed elsewhere? Adding to the heat wherever the electricity is finally consumed. (Ignoring various losses along the way).

thegrim000 commented on Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center space.com/space-explorati... · Posted by u/troglo-byte

stouset · 4 days ago

Even if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat.

If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.

thegrim000 · 4 days ago

I read it as the inefficient part isn't the compute efficiency, the inefficient part is dumping all the resulting heat into the environment without capturing it and using it in some way to generate electricity or do work.

On a related/side note, when there's talk about seti and dyson spheres, and detecting them via infrared waste heat, I also don't understand that. Such an alien civilization is seemingly capable of building massive space structures/projects, but then lets the waste heat just pour out into the universe in such insane quantities that we could see it tens/hundreds of light years away? What a waste. Why wouldn't they recover that heat and make use of it instead? And repeat the recovering until the final waste output is too small to bother recovering, at which point we would no longer be able to detect it.

thegrim000 commented on A collective fuck-you letter from humanity to 2025 worstregards.com/... · Posted by u/tom8opot8o

thegrim000 · 4 days ago

So, it's just a collaboratively edited two minutes of hate session.

thegrim000 commented on Deliberate Internet Shutdowns schneier.com/blog/archive... · Posted by u/WaitWaitWha

stego-tech · 5 days ago

The post is mainly just a CTA against further internet centralization and government control of core infrastructure, which is fine. We need more of these, and we need more examples of their harms for folks to draw on. HN often gets distilled down to a singular cause - EU's Chat Control, Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine, a regional outage of a public cloud provider - but generalized topics like these aren't really discussed all too often I find, or are often flagged for a variety of reasons and shutdown.

As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines - programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers, product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.

We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.

thegrim000 · 5 days ago

>> Elon's shutdown of Starlink over Ukraine

"In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military.[3][5] The satellite service has been employed for humanitarian purposes as well as defense and counterattacks on Russian positions.[6]"

"In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...

thegrim000 commented on New mathematical framework reshapes debate over simulation hypothesis santafe.edu/news-center/n... · Posted by u/Gooblebrai

thegrim000 · 5 days ago

Once again, discussion around the simulation hypothesis that for some reason assumes the simulating universe has the exact same laws of physics / reality as the simulated universe. Assuming that the simulated universe can use their mathematics to describe/constrain the simulator universe. It makes no sense to me.

thegrim000 commented on The state of the kernel Rust experiment lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/dochtman

yourdetect · 8 days ago

From the comment section:

> To me the more salient questions are how long before (a) we get Rust in a core subsystem (thus making Rust truly _required_ instead of "optional unless you have hardware foo"), and (b) requiring Rust for _all_ new code.

Previously, the position was that C developers would not be forced to learn Rust.

And a few days ago a security vulnerability was found in the Rust Linux kernel code.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46309536

thegrim000 · 7 days ago

Well yeah, that's the strategy.

"You don't need to learn it or use it, we just want to do our own separate things with it over here"

.. some time later ..

"Oh yeah it's working good for us, we think it'd be useful to use it in these additional places, think about the benefits!"

.. some time later ..

"Now it's going to be core and required, either deal with it or get out"

They know they could never jump straight to the last step without revolt, so they shove their foot in the door with fake promises and smiles and then slowly over time force the door all the way open until they eventually get what they wanted from the beginning.

thegrim000 commented on Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks kdpcommunity.com/s/articl... · Posted by u/captn3m0

al_borland · 7 days ago

Banning long-time customers in otherwise good-standing for a mistake they made years ago, which would already be settled financially and such a minor cost is wild.

I can imagine something like this has happened to almost everyone.

So much for being the world’s most customer-centric company. That mission is dead.

thegrim000 · 7 days ago

99.99% of the time when you read something on the internet and your reaction is "that's wild" / "wow that's crazy" / "that's unbelievable", then what you are reading is in fact likely nowhere near the actual truth / real.

thegrim000 commented on The Mysterious Forces Steering Views on Hacker News xn--gckvb8fzb.com/the-mys... · Posted by u/dxs

thegrim000 · 8 days ago

I mean, the real steering force is the fact that somewhere between a quarter and a third of all stories on HN come from the same ~20 power users whose accounts post a dozen stories every single day of every single year to the site. Last time I ran AI sentiment analysis over the stories from those accounts, it classified over a third of them as either breaking HN's posted guidelines or as being "extremely" political in nature. And yet the mods are seemingly fine with the situation.

thegrim000 commented on Yes, social media is a cause of the epidemic of teenage mental illness afterbabel.com/p/phone-ba... · Posted by u/throwup238

rgbrenner · 2 years ago

The author had it right in the first paragraph. In the 90s version of this hysteria, Congress passed a law that would have prevented access to education medical information, dirty curse words, and other filth from being published on the internet to protect the children. The federal government fought a case all the way to the Supreme Court to enforce it. If they had won that case, the internet would look very different today. But the Supreme Court got it right when they said it would squelch free speech.

You may not like FB, IG, TikTok, etc.. I certainly don't care for any of these products. But these are communications platforms. Restricting the right to free speech does have negative consequences... from the development of critical thinking skills; development of technical skills; and limiting of educational information. Being exposed to shit on the internet teaches you there's bullshit on the internet, and not to believe everything you see.

And just like the Supreme Court wrote 30 years ago, the answer is the same today: if you don't like these products and feel they are negative, then don't use them. Restrict your children's access to these platforms.

I certainly dont believe anyone should be forced to use these platforms. I don't use any of these products, and havent since they launched. That's a freedom you and everyone else can take advantage of also. But those who advocate censorship aren't advocating for freedom... they're advocating for their personal parental decisions to the be decisions of the entire nation.

thegrim000 · 2 years ago

It's funny .. earlier today there was a front page HN post about the federal government mandating safer circular saws. It seemed like the majority of users in the thread were in favor of the federal government mandating technology changes to prevent harm from being done to the population.

Now for this issue, there's harm being done to children, and the majority of users in the thread seem to be against government intervention; you say: "well if you don't like it, if you think it's negative, just don't use it, don't let your kids use it".

Kind of a random parallel to draw between the two stories, but it's funny the same logic doesn't seem to apply in both cases. Why wasn't for circular saws the response "if you think they're dangerous, don't use them" or "just keep your kids away from them"?